My plant grow simulation finally comes together! Working on this on the side for my garden simulation game. Actually in-game this is not supposed to grow in realtime, but it could!

My idea is that modelling plants is very hard and I want a solution that can simply not hand made, so I needed to make a system. It can handle normally self supporting plants but also climbing structure.

I am not yet sure how this works in a growded environment and some special cases are not yet supported, but the first tests look promising

The idea is to grow plants in the background while player switches days, so performance is not the main concern. I only like to have a little preview maybe of the next few growing steps and that players can control grow direction.

Now this is still a preview, I would need to make propper mesh generation later and I want to know at each point how stable the plant is, how far it is from its stem etc. so that I can make a more believable wind simulation in the shaders.

Today I'd like to share my views on the topic of making a living as a trader. Leaving strategies, possibilities, performances and everything aside, this is purely about the math behind the question: Am I able to make a living with trading under certain conditions and what do I need to achieve this.

All I want is to provide another view that may not be covered very often on social media and align expectations of beginners.

And of course I'd like to get your view on that topic as well. Which R:R, WinRates and expectency values are realistic or is it all shenanigans?

Let's start with the main question, what do you need to make a living per month?

$1,000, $2,000, $5,000, $10.000?

Think about everything, Rent, Electricity, Food, Subscriptions, Car/mobility, Health insurance, pension funds etc. etc.

What taxes do you pay on your income from trading? You must add that to that number.

I make a simple example for my situation here in Germany, we pay a flat fee of 26,375%. But for simplification let's say it's 25%. If I want to earn 3,000€ a month then I need to make 4,000€ every month with trading.

Metric Calculation

There is a simple formular to calculate your Expectancy value per trade, which tells you how much % you make per trade depending on your Risk value:

R:R × WinRate − (1 − WinRate)

But for me this is very short sighted and a binary view on things. Reality is different, depending on your trading style. Sometimes you make break even trades, sometimes you take partial gain, sometimes you close early.

Hence I rather like to combine these things, but that is not a simple formular anymore.

But you can take an expected WinRate, BreakEven rate and rates for partial takes.

So you calculate the percentage of partial takes from WinRate and then define how much that is from full R:R.

Your LossRate is 1 - WinRate - BreakEvenRate.

Now for example if I take my expected WinRate of 35% with an R:R of 3 I get an expectancy value of 40% and this is very good.

But when I account for BreakEven and partial gains like above then I quickly drop that number down to only 13,7%.

This is even though my LossRate shrinks from 65% to 52%.

The point I want to make is that even small shifts in WinRate make quite dramatic changes in Expectancy. Even with the simple formular above, if I reduce my WinRate by 5% down to 30%, I gian literally just half the money in total.

When we come to calculating possible return per month this effectively means that I either need twice the risk (aka money) or twice the number of trades to make up for that.

Journaling

This shows the importance of Journaling your trades and collecting data! You don't need to guess numbers if you got a solid and consistent record.

Monthly Return

Trading is not linear, sure. But it is all we got to work with. If you got your Expectancy Value then you can now take your expected number of trades per day (or week) and multiply both with R:R:

Trades x R:R x ExpectancyValue = Profit per Day

Take this x 20 and you roughtly get number of trades per month. This already takes into account holidays and days off. But you might even want to work with an even lower value to account for more downtime. 15 should be a very safe bet.

Ok, remember I need to make 4.000€ per month and let's assume that I can only risk 50€ per trade, my account is not big enough now. Let's see what my Reward/Trade is and how many trades I need to make for each expectancy value

35% - R:T: 17,50€ - Trades: 11,43

13,7% - R:T: 6,85€ - Trades: 29,20

Well, that is a day job. But I trade more on the 4h chart. So my strategy is 2 trades a day max, what must my risk be then?

35% - Risk per Trade: 285€

13,7% - Risk per Trade: 730€

Max Drawdown (Edit)

So we just increase position size right? No. If you can't take 15 or 20 loosing trades in a short period, then your R is too high! No matter if you trade your own money or a prop trading account, I would suggest to multiply R by 15 or 20 and see if this suits the max drawdown that your challange metrics or youself allow you to risk.

For a 10% max drawdown rate this sums up to 0,5% to 0,75% risk of the portfolio, which is what is widely suggested anyways to keep it below or around 1% on average. Above that, you bust your account with less than 10 trades in a row, this not unlikely at all.

Personal Note

These are not exactly my personal numbers but the scale is. I am working towards becoming a fulltime trader even though these numbers do not add up currently, I am aware of this.

My plan is to begin with risk of 5€, then go up to 10€ mid June and then add 10€ every month. Goal is to deal with higher risk values and trade profits because I chicken out all the time. Currently profit is not what I want, but I want to win Rs and bring these metrics up. So even my average 3€ trade is like the 250€ risk that I need to achieve one day to make things work at least partially.

If I follow my personal list that I made based on the logic above, I am reaching 3k net income per month in December 2027. I'll tell you then if I made it.

TL;DR in the image you see in blue the values that we can calculate from the provided data next to the results that my calculator put out. The only thing which is slightly off is VAT and this is because we can only use exact sales numbers of 4 countries and everything else is averaged. Also some countries have VAT rates above 22% which is the highest my calculator uses and if sales bias toward those countries then the results are obviously different.

I showed this calculator before but people fighted it. Yet it is rock solid for what it does and I put hours and days into it validating the numbers. The error is just about 3% and I want to proof it today. Here is the link: http://steamcalculator.nubosoft.de/

It is all meant to be a reliable tool for indie dev expectations that plan to make a living out of game dev or need reliable values for their bank, business plan or publisher.

The downside is though that sales numbers and sales ratios can not be predicted, but you can estimate for example:

• Revenue of likely minimal sales
• Revenue of high/above average sales
• Sales required to reach break even
• Revenue if 20% of players buy your new DLC
• Will translating into chinese be worth it?
• What If only 10% of wishlists convert?

Errors or questions?

I had a mistake with withholding taxes but it has been fixed as it only applies to US income. Now I can't see anything that would be wrong but please point out any issues. Obviously we do not consider the Steam Share drop to 25%, you can do that manually.

I'd also be interested in feedback on the default discount ratios.
Also helpful is if this tool due to its many paramets is just hard to use, that one I get.

Share and Help

I work with facts and put some lifetime into this thing. Too many peole have simply no idea about taxes and percentages and mix up numbers all the time and that is ok. But it does not help those who seek an answer, so I ask you to bookmark and share this post or tool. This is especially true because things change. Steam payout ratios from 10 years ago don't matter anymore, taxing and currencies changed a lot.

Proof and exaplanation

Thankfully the developer of TangyTD released his sales numbers recently. Not only revenue but also units sold in the top 10 countries. They are from May and so I took all that I could and used these numbers in my calculator. I even choose the release weeks average exchange rates of every currency involved. Also the game was sold with a flat 12% discount in that time which I considered.

First we got gross price per unit, that is simply gross sales $245,123 divided by steam units 28,078 = $8,73.

The net revenue of $197,847 is what Steam takes their 30% share which is $59,354. *In fact devs also get back their $100 Steam direct fee if net revenue crosses $1,000.

This leaves the developer with a payout of $138,492. Here we need to deduct banking fees which we do not know exactly, but let it be a few hundred dollars. We are already very close to what my tool predicts calculates, which is $138,258.

But let's go to the details.

We know that we got 10,3% return rate so we can estimate a return revenue of $25,247. This is an estimation because we do not know which countries those returns came from, but they should average out most of the time.

We can calculate net price per unit by dividing net revenue by net units (25,186) and that is about $7,86, just 3 cents off from my tool.

This diference is VAT and we can get it as well. First we need "true" gross revenue by removing the refunds from gross revenue, which is $219,875. "True", because refunds are not really sales. We need net-sales gross-revenue.

If we subtract net revenue from that value we get $22,028 which is the estimated VAT that was actually paid and transfered by Steam.

So the average VAT percentage is 10,02%.

We can double check that by comparing gross and net unit prices: 1 - ($7,86 / $8,73) = 9,97%. Here is a minimal error due to decimal loss.

So my tool is off by 3 cents of VAT per unit. And that is like I said the uncertainty of localized sales which we can only average close enough. Another uncertainty is simply estimated refund rate and which prices the dev has choosen for each country. My tool uses the default table from SteamDB for each price region. If we knew the exact refunded revenue we could even be closer to the truth.

Saw these logo posts recently where people either were scammed by AI artists or had to spend more than $20 to get a decent logo.

As we have just done our first logo for an upcoming convention, I thought that I want to share my regular process. We did this in one day, many sketches and versions.

 EDIT: Thanks for the feedback, but I got to clarify a few things:

- I could not do this without the artist, I used his CITY and Punk font he drew as a base. Just compare our pencil sketches!
- This post is about process and collaboration**.** It shows how I came to what I had in mind (left) with his help (right).
- His refined version is just the first vector translation that he did at the end of day. He could go on.
- Price of the artist is kinda relative, we got a sort of flatrate. It includes many variations not shown here.
- Artist is not a pure logo artist, he is an alrounder doing concept art, 3D models etc.
- I am glad that we work together and that I found someone who is capable of many things.

Post

Often I think that we see art as a regular task like cleaning dishes, putting up a painting on the wall or even install some electronics. I pay you X, give me Y. But that is not how it works. Art and creative work is not measurable and heavily relies on intrinsic factors.

My personal issue is that I often know what I want and I also got some basic artistic training. But I cannot get onto paper what I see in my head and not skilled enough to make fine artwork, especially in reasonable time.

My artist is, he is capable in many ways and he is fast! But from working with skilled artists for a while now I often see that they seem to lack a few specific things. It can be lighting, it can be proportions, readability, composition, contrast etc. Art leads have a place in the industry for a reason and artists thrive with good creative leads. Alone, they may not perform the same.
*Could also be the complete opposite if the situation is bad, I look at the ideal scenario here.

I don't claim to know everything of course, but what I see I note and we work it out. This process worked for me for a decade now and every artist I worked with liked it. And that is the point, it is a process. I work with artists live on discord, back and forth chatting. Not via a kanban board or daily email.

There might be this thing that you do not want your customers to fool around if they have no clue. But if they are your partner on eye level then you get so much better results.

This shouldn’t become too philosophical. All I wanted to say is, team up. See your artists as partners, not delivery people. If you have a clear vision then try to show and describe it.

If you do or cannot, then well you must take what you get. May hire an art director as well.
It is not the artist’s fault not being able to read your mind.

Our logo is not final yet, but it as great first version! I am of cours also open to critique on the Logo and what I wrote above. What are your experiences and processes in a creative team?